name the stars
by vega-de-la-lyre
Summary: In the months since Nero, Chapel and McCoy have been dancing a peculiar waltz around one another. An away mission gone wrong provides a brutal sort of catalyzing agent for their relationship. A romance in seven parts, or a horror story in four.
1. a prologue

+Warnings for strong horror themes, violence, death, sex, and lots of trauma.  
+ With apologies to Richard Siken for cruelly stripping his lovely words of all context (and, unfortunately, formatting); and to Steven Moffat and Stephen King, for stealing some of the best elements of some of their stories.

* * *

a prologue.

* * *

You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.  
{**you are jeff**: richard siken.}

* * *

It feels indescribably strange to be back in your cadet reds.

You cross your legs and pull down your sleeves and shiver and shift a little on your bench on the boardwalk overlooking the ocean. The sun is going down quickly and without fanfare, and there's already a fog rolling in off the water; it's going to be a cool damp night. You wrap your arms around yourself, and you watch.

"Hey, Chapel," you hear at your shoulder, and it's Doctor McCoy; he's dressed in civilian clothes, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, collar turned up against the cold. He sits down beside you on the bench, looking out at the water. His dark hair snags on the breeze, falling over his forehead, and your breath catches a little and you hold onto your elbows that much tighter to stop yourself from brushing it out of his eyes. He looks as tired as you feel — you know he's been pulling as many double-shifts at the hospital as you have to make up for lost hands — and he's just showered and shaved; you can smell the cologne and soap.

"Hey," you say back easily, and you turn to him a little, cocking your head; you took a bad blow from flying equipment when the ship was cracking apart during that last mad dance of life and death around the black hole and your right ear still isn't on its game, there's still a tinny ringing in your skull that you know will clear up soon but it's annoying as long as it lasts.

"Jim Kirk's got the Enterprise, and I'm going with him," he says without preamble, still looking out over the ocean. "Five year mission. Not a surprise, I guess, all things considered, but it's going to be made official tomorrow morning."

"Oh," is all you say, flexing your booted foot up and down a little.

"I want you with me," he says, turning to you now, leaning his arm over the back of the bench. In the fading light his eyes are dark and earnest. "With us. Head Nurse. You more than proved yourself during the whole clusterfuck with the Romulans, and I won't feel good about taking CMO unless I know I've got you backing me up."

"No pressure, or anything," you murmur, and your gaze is drawn to his lips when they twist into a wry smile.

"I'm serious," he says. "I get what kind of commitment it is, but you're the best. I mean, I knew that before, but I sure as hell know that now. You deserve to be on the best ship in the fleet. I know you've got your research, and that boyfriend of yours — "

You laugh at that, short and sharp, and the sound echoes out across the water. "Not anymore," you say, feeling giddy and light. "I dumped his ass the day we got back. Something about trials by fire that makes a girl rethink her priorities, you know."

"Yeah, I kind of know the feeling," he says, and he shakes his head, brow furrowed, and adds more seriously, "I won't try and dick you around about your career, but you know what an opportunity this is and med school'll be waiting for you when we get back — God, I forget how young you are sometimes," and you're sure he doesn't mean it as an insult but it cuts all the same.

"It's weird," you say after a moment. "It doesn't feel like living, being back here. Everyone else, the ones who weren't there, they just don't quite get it. At all."

"No, I guess they don't," he agrees, and he pauses. "You'll do it, won't you?"

"I'll think about it," you say even though you already know what your answer will be, you already know you'd follow him and Jim Kirk to the furthest coldest corners of the universe. You didn't join Starfleet to hang around on Earth, after all.

"Get back to me when the week's over, I'm heading home to Georgia for a few days," he says, standing, and you follow his lead and stand up too. "Thank you, Christine," he says, and you want to return the favour in kind, want to toss off his name like you have that right but no one calls here him Leonard, just his last name or his title or his nickname and you can't bring yourself to do it. The image rises up unbidden in your mind of laying back against a couch with laughter full in your throat and calling him by name with easy intimacy and long practise as he draws you in for a kiss and your cheeks flush and you remember his ex-wife and you wonder, _did she call him Len?_

The words lock behind your teeth and you stare at the ground, aching and young and impossibly raw. You bury your chin into the high collar of your uniform and you sigh or you gasp a little, face turned away where he will not hear you or see the brightness in your stinging eyes and he takes your hand and you start and you automatically jerk away from his grasp a little but he doesn't let go, he knots his fingers into yours strong and sure and his thumb brushes along your palm and you are certain that he can feel your terror (and another thing, sweet and thrumming, something you won't put words to yet) through your white knuckles, through the stumbling pulse that throbs through your skin, but you hold on anyway.

The lights lining the boardwalk hum into full strength. You squint against them, looking away into the sky; you haven't been paying attention to how quickly the dark's been rising.

"Come on," he tells you, and you look back at him. He holds your gaze and the lights hit his face just right and his eyes are lit brilliant for a brief moment, the clearest and warmest hazel-green you've ever seen; but he blinks away, his lashes lowered, and the moment is lost. He tugs lightly at your hand. "Let's go."

The wind picks up and it lifts your hair and tangles it into your mouth and eyes as you as you head together back through the deepening blue-grey night towards the bright lights of campus. You rake your hair back from your face with your free hand; he pulls you nearer and he swings your entwined arms a little as you walk in tandem and he doesn't look at you or say anything else but he leans in close and grips your hand tighter, his shoulders bumping yours companionably, and you think, _okay. This could work, we can make this work._

_Whatever the hell this is._


	2. chapter one

chapter one.

* * *

…Here is the river, and here is the box, and here are  
the monsters we put in the box to test our strength  
against. Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here's  
the desire to put it inside us, and then the question  
behind every question: _What happens next?_  
{**snow and dirty rain**; richard siken.}

* * *

The morning begins quiet and slow. It's really an unfavorable omen; Christine should know that by now.

It had been like this last week, just before things went to hell in a handbasket and Kirk showed up in her sickbay with an inhibition-reducing, highly-transmittable alien infection and a badly fractured leg and a team of bounty hunters on his heels wreaking havoc through the ship. That'd been a fun day.

But now it's approaching the start of alpha shift and she and McCoy are leaving the mess together when McCoy is hailed by the captain over his communicator. "I need to see you in my ready room," is all Kirk says shortly, and McCoy raises his eyebrows and nods in the general direction of the bridge while Christine takes a last juicy bite out of a Fergalian pear and discards the core.

"Well, come on, then," he says. "It should only be a minute, he's probably just looking for more sympathy on that leg of his."

"Which you'll provide in abundance, of course," Christine says drily around a messy mouthful of fruit as they enter a lift, and he snorts and takes a swipe with his thumb at the sticky juice on her chin.

"Yeah, well," he says. "He says I set the damned thing crooked. I say, osteo-regenerator aside, it hurts when you break a bone and then run around on it all day, and he should be used to it by now."

"You'd think," Christine says brilliantly, scrubbing at her face with the cuff of her sleeve to hide the bright flush that's risen in her cheeks, and the lift opens and he gestures for her to step out first.

She arches an eyebrow at him; he shakes his head at her.

"And they say chivalry's dead," she teases him, going on ahead, and when they turn the next corner Kirk's door opens readily to McCoy's typed command.

Kirk's sitting over his small desk, his bad leg propped up on a chair. "Hey, Bones," he says, and though his voice is casual his face is tight and his eyes flick up and over McCoy's shoulder to Christine for a moment; she crosses her arms almost defensively, but he doesn't object to her presence, just waves them both in.

"Priority one distress call was just patched through," he says as the door slides shut behind them, and under his fingers a video comes up on the screen over his desk. "I don't know if you remember it, but our second year at the Academy, they discovered a new Class M planet — completely uninhabited, though I guess there were clear signs of civilization and industry in the very recent past. Sit."

"Ranaulma'ar IV," Christine says, sitting obediently. "The ghost planet."

"I remember something of it," McCoy says grudgingly. "What about it?"

"That there's Doctor Rucha Maji," Kirk says, nodding at the pleading woman frozen on the viewscreen behind him, her mouth half-open and eyes wide. "Admiral Van Graan's prized anthropologist, they served together on the _Endeavour_ back in the day. She was assigned to the planet with a team of engineers and researchers to one of the deserted cities to figure out the place, find out what happened. It's pretty far out here, so updates have been sporadic at best and non-existent for the past few weeks."

"Which is where disaster strikes and we come in, I suppose," McCoy says, voice resigned.

Kirk just nods back to the viewscreen and lets the video play from the beginning.

Doctor Maji is sitting in what's clearly her office, the architecture clean and sparse, a standard hastily-constructed cookier-cutter Starfleet base. It's a wreck, though; what furniture is in the room is upturned and broken, and there's a violent spray of what looks horrifically like blood across one clear wall. Her hands flutter agitatedly as she talks. "I'm sending this transmission on the morning of Stardate 2258.302. We just lost another of our men to _it_ — " She swallows convulsively, and Christine's throat closes up in sympathy. "There's only six of us left here, we've lost nearly all of our team since they disturbed it, since they woke it up, something's disabled our transport crafts and Kohl, I think he's lost his mind, he's saying things about making sure it stays with us, that _it_ won't leave the planet — "

"Kohl's her head engineer on the project," Kirk mutters out of the corner of his mouth.

" — Please," Maji finishes, and numbers flash briefly on the corner of the screen. "Please, someone come get us, I'm sending you our coordinates. We only have fifteen hours till sundown, but I know we won't last out the night, for God's sake, _help us_."

There is a loud banging sound offscreen, and Maji starts in terror, and the transmission flickers to an end.

"So," Kirk says.

"My God," Christine says.

"Sounds like one of those awful pulp horror movies you love so much," McCoy says. "What're you planning on doing?"

"We're going to pull them now, but the thing is," Kirk says almost hesitantly, and Christine's back straightens and she pays attention; as long as she's known Kirk he's never been one to approach things in anything but a perfectly straight line. "The thing is, it's kind of a delicate situation. We're going into geostationary orbit around the planet now, but I've got to keep it quiet — van Graan has a lot invested in this excavation, he's the one who just sent along the call to me personally. I can't go down there myself, but I need people I can trust to keep their mouths shut. I've got Kostya, one of the guys from archaeology and anthropology, he's done a bit of research on the place himself and he knows what's what, and I've got a good pair of people from security. But Bones, you saw that blood yourself. I want a medical officer down there."

Christine goes cold, and though she doesn't say anything she just looks at McCoy. His face is grim and wary.

"You've got to be kidding me, Jim," McCoy says, but at that moment Kirk's communicator goes off and he flips it open, looking irritable at the interruption.

"Go," he says.

Uhura's voice over the communicator is tense. "Captain, there's a coolant leak down by the warp core," she says. "Five officers injured. They're looking for Doctor McCoy."

"Well, there you go, Jim," McCoy says, lifting his hands away from the table and heading for the door. "I'm not going anywhere for a good while, and I'm not sparing any other doctors for this racket. Just send a handful of security officers down there and fetch back any wounded, then we'll start talking."

Kirk lets out an aggravated sigh and sits back heavily in his chair. "If the situation's as bad as my gut's telling me, I don't want any landing party heading down there without medical officers," he says, and then his eyes fix on Christine thoughtfully as she follows McCoy out. She shifts under the sudden scrutiny. "What about you, Nurse? Bones here trusts your judgement, and I know you've been stuck onboard for more than a month. Want to have a look for me?"

"Oh, _hell_ no," McCoy says instantly, hand holding back the door, and Christine looks between the two men, between her Captain and her direct superior, and her chin goes up and impulsively she says,

"Sure, why not?"

McCoy's face is surprised, and something in Christine twists furiously; she's got her pride, after all.

"What? You go on these things all the time, I'm not allowed to have an exploring itch?" She shrugs one shoulder eloquently. "It's not your decision to make anyway. And he's right, going down there into a possible crisis situation without medical personnel doesn't sound all that bright to me. I can help."

"It is _absolutely_ my decision," he says, stepping close, "you're _my_ staff and the only reason I go off on these fool missions of Jim's is so everyone else doesn't end up maimed or diseased or _dead_ — "

She thinks saying something like _your xenophobia is showing again_ or _for God's sake, do you really think so little of my abilities that I can't keep myself alive planetside for five minutes_ would probably not be conducive to achieving her goal, but she opens her mouth anyway and steps even closer and then Kirk is standing up and sidling between the two of them, limping on his bad leg, his hands stretched wide pacifyingly.

"All right, kids," he says, "I think by now we've established by now that I'm the last guy anyone should go to for mediating conflicts in a rational and non-violent manner but so help me I will sit you down and play counsellor and solve this thing with words, lots and lots of touchy-feely _words_ all over the place."

Christine looks at McCoy mutely. His face doesn't relax, tension written clearly in the tautness of his hands and neck and the quick rise and fall of his chest. His eyes though, are shadowed, and she can't quite read them.

"Fine, go," McCoy says finally. "Whatever happens, it's on your own damn head."

"Just in and out," Kirk tells her, sitting back in his chair. "Let us know what's going on as soon as you can, then we'll beam all your asses out of there."

"Yes, Captain," Christine says.

Kirk smiles ruefully as he props his leg back up again. "You know I'd be down there myself if I could."

"Believe me," she says, "I know that, sir."

McCoy is close behind her when she leaves. "Don't you try and make him feel better," he says, but she cuts him off —

"Oh, for the love of God, McCoy," she says crossly, turning down the corridor to the transporter room. "It's got to be done, it might as well be me as anyone else."

"Fine. I'll go. You stay here. Anybody can handle a few burns, they don't really need me for it."

She swings through the open doorway just in time to see Kostya Levin and the security officers, Blake and Medina, disappear in a blaze of light and scattering particles. She turns back to McCoy as she straps her satchel across her chest and snags a communicator.

"I'm just doing my job," she says tiredly, and she can see his pulse jump in his throat. "Why'd you even hire me if you can't trust me to do that much?"

He opens his mouth, and then closes it. "Sleeve up," he says gruffly, and she obeys; he injects a subdermal locator into her forearm and adds a little more gently, his hand lingering on her bare skin, thumb pressed into the underside of her wrist, "And you know I trust you, I just don't want to have to sort through the miles of paperwork to figure out which of those numbskulls down there is fit to replace you if you go get yourself killed by some crazy-ass scientist or a Lovecraftian denizen of the deep."

"What a softie," she says, but she smiles and when he lets go of her arm she feels strangely bereft. "You need to get down to sickbay, take care of the idiots from Engineering," she adds, but he waves her words off as she steps up onto the now-empty platform.

"Be quick," he says, crossing his arms. "Try and come back alive."

"Energize," she says, standing at the ready, and she tilts her head at McCoy mischievously, saying "Wish me luck?" as light swirls bright and brilliant around her. She's joking, but at the same time she means it, and the smile falls away from her lips and the last she sees of the Enterprise is his face, his eyes fixed on hers, his mouth opening to speak.

There is a brief head-spinning moment of nothingness before the world reforms new and strange and solid under her feet again.

"Ugh," Christine says, putting her hand to her head to steady herself. Her ears are ringing, and she's not quite sure her stomach is in the right place; times like these, she can sympathise with McCoy's distaste for transporter tech.

"Hey," Blake says cheerfully, poking through a box; they've been put down in the outpost storage room, stacked high with supplies and well-packed artifacts and specimens, but weirdly the walls and ceilings are almost entirely made of transparisteel to let in a maximum amount of sunlight, opening onto a dun-coloured dimming sky and a grim craggy landscape of rocks and sharp drops. Christine looks up; the light is fading far faster than any sunset she's ever seen.

"We're getting some kind of electromagnetic interference here," Kostya says; the holographic blueprint he holds out in front of him flickers dizzily in and out of coherency. "Our communicators keep cutting out."

"Environmental?'

Medina makes a face and takes his phaser off his hip. "I really doubt it," he says. "Looks like someone's trying to get an EM field generator online."

"Well, that's not good," Christine mutters, and they all whip around when a woman's voice calls from down the hall.

"I'm down here," they can hear her say faintly, and Blake and Medina lead the way in that direction. Christine follows behind Kostya, looking at the sky thoughtfully. The orange sun is hovering just above the horizon, just on the verge of disappearing.

When they find Doctor Rucha Maji, she's sitting in the office from the video. It looks even more wrecked than it had before; the furniture has been swept back against the clear walls, and the whole place is rigged up with hot crude lights, hanging from the ceiling, lining the floor.

"You're from the _Enterprise_?" Maji says. Her hands are visibly shaking, with fear or relief, Christine can't tell. "Thank God. Get me the hell out of here."

"But where's the rest of your team?" Blake asks, squinting and shadowing her eyes.

Doctor Maji's face is bleak. "There's just Kohl and I left," she says, and the power flickers. "And that'd be Kohl," Maji adds, looking miserable.

"Well, why isn't he here?" Medina demands. "I don't think, given the circumstances, it'll matter if you leave the lights on — I thought you guys just wanted out."

Maji laughs, and there's a note of frantic hysteria beneath it. "He doesn't want to go anywhere," she says, "she doesn't want me to go anywhere, he doesn't want _you_ to go anywhere…"

Medina frowns. "So, what, he turned out the lights? What does he think that'll achieve"

Doctor Maji shakes her heard, her eyes bright with terror. "He's built a field inducer," she says, "that will not only stop your ship from beaming any of us off this planet, but drain the internal power supply of this station and cut all the lights."

Christine stares. "But why would he want to do that?"

"Doctor Maji," Christine says sharply. "What's going on here?"

The power goes out just as the sun dips completely past the horizon.

Doctor Maji's jury-rigged lights keep running, but the rest of the building has fallen into darkness; Blake goes to the door and peers down the pitch-black hall, but Maji stands, looking petrified —

"Don't," Maji says, voice low with warning. "Whatever you do, do not step out of the light. Not a toe."

A high-pitched humming fills the air, a murmuring that rises and rises in volume till it fills the air around them until it hurts to hear. Christine fingers the strap across her chest and tries to breathe deeply, in and out, feeling her blood rush to her limbs with panic.

"Chyort," Kostya says desperately, his hands over his ears, "_kakogo chyorta_," and he backs away into the middle of the wide circle of the light, grasping hard at Christine's elbow.

"What the _hell_ is that," Medina says, looking back at them confusedly before he peers again into the empty blackness. "Bugs?"

"Don't," Maji says again, pushing past Christine, "what did I tell you, _don't_ — "

Medina steps into the shadows, and he jerks like someone's pulled him with all their strength; his head snaps back and his arm flails and before he has time for more than a terrible cut-off grunt he is gone into the darkness. There's a horrible screeching, ripping noise, like a million teeth tearing into flesh at once, a billion insects buzzing in some kind of sick harmony, and Blake has her phaser out, her eyes wide and uncertain, and Kostya's shouting something beside Christine but she can't hear him over the noise and she can't see anything of what's happening in the shadows.

She steps forward for a closer look, shielding her eyes from the glare of Maji's lights, and it's like moving through water, moving in slow motion; she knows she's calling Medina's name but the sound is muffled and distant by the time it reaches her ears. The smell of blood and viscera chokes the air, and she gags, but heedless of Kostya at her side and Doctor Maji's firm grip on her wrist, tugging at her, keeping her away from the darkness, she stretches her other hand out to pull Medina back —

The noise lets up suddenly, and there's a moment of hideous, shocked silence before his broken skeleton collapses back into their ring of artificial light and crumbles into a fine dust.


	3. chapter two

chapter two.

* * *

Every morning the maple leaves.  
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts  
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big  
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out  
_ You will be alone always and then you will die. _  
{**litany in which certain things are crossed out**; richard siken.}

* * *

The murmuring subsides.

Christine kneels, numb with horror, and sifts through the dust and delicate remnants of bone that was once Lieutenant Medina. She picks up a curving fragment of skull, and it breaks apart in her hand.

The others stare at her as she stands, and she clenches her hand into a fist. "Doctor Maji," she says. "You'd better start from the beginning."

"Yes," Maji says. "Yes, all right."

Christine backs away from the shadowed hallway into the brilliantly lit office, already feeling hot under the glaring lights. Outside, the night is velvet-dark, the deepest black she's ever seen. Maji perches on the edge of her desk, and Christine stands between Kostya and Blake; there's a stunned and broken look on Blake's face as she clings to her phaser, and Kostya's breathing is wild and uneven. She knows she might soon have to treat them for shock, but she isn't entirely sure that someone else shouldn't be doing the same for her.

Maji smoothes down the front of her uniform unsteadily. "We began our mission here, what, nearly a year ago now? More than that." She shakes her head. "You lose track of time here, you see. We started on the surface, at what seemed like the most significant center of civilization on the planet — oh, they call it a city back home, but it's hardly that — "

"Little pockets of life in the hills," Kostya says suddenly through still-white lips. "I read the reports your team's been sending back."

"Yes, exactly," Maji says. "The population must have been so tiny — nearly nonexistent — but they were here, they were humanoid, and their culture was positively thriving, their artistic heritage was just _fascinating_, you really should see it, Doctor…?"

"Nurse," Christine says. "Nurse Christine Chapel."

It's a bit odd to be doing introductions, after all this.

"Nurse Chapel," Maji agrees. "They were clearly advancing further and further, doing crude work with metal, making huge technological strides — but then they disappeared. Apart from their homes and what's left of their belongings, there's no trace of what happened to them. No bodies, no evidence of any massive cull, and short of some outside race taking them all off-planet at once, they certainly didn't leave, they hadn't come close to developing that kind of technology."

"So?" Christine says.

"So," Maji says. "So here's what we think — what we _know_ happened."

She twists around to grab a padd and pulls up a schematic on a half-shattered screen, a rendering of what looks like a cave or a shaft of some kind sunk deep into the side of a mountain.

"A month ago, we stumbled across this place. We thought it was just another hole in the rock, but it turns out to be incredibly, impossibly deep. W still hadn't gotten near to mapping the bottom of it, before — " She swallows, and flips to a new window, displaying meticulously recorded hieroglyphs. "Before. There were warnings painted on the mouth of the tunnel, here, and here — "

Kostya leans in over her shoulder to examine the hieroglyphs more closely, eyes keen, like he might lose himself in research and forget the horror of what's just happened. "Oh, that's beautiful," he breathes.

"Isn't it?" Maji says. "We haven't — hadn't — quite managed to translate them entirely, but the thrust of it is fairly clear."

"What, 'not good, run away'?" Christine says, but she says it under her breath.

"In essence," Maji says, shooting her a wry look. "We ignored the warnings, of course. We kept going and — we woke it up. Whatever it is. The same as they must have done. It took half of our team in that first few minutes, before we discovered its aversion to light."

"'It'," Christine repeats, and wipes at the sweat at the back of her neck. "Not them, it? It sounded like a whole lot of something to me. Do you think it's some kind of hive mind, or — "

Maji shrugs tightly. "Your theory's as good as mine," she says, "but you saw what it did to that man. There's thought there. There's _malevolence_ there. Which is why Kohl is so determined to keep us here, to keep anyone or any information from leaving. He's just — just trying to stop it from spreading further. And I understand that, I do, but I also want to _live_, Nurse Chapel, you know?"

Her eyes are bright again, and Christine carefully avoids looking back over her shoulder at the dark hallway. Blake shifts uneasily beside her.

"Okay," Christine says. "Right. Okay. To get off-planet, we need to shut down that electromagnetic field of Kohl's. To do that, we need to leave this room. Which means we need lights. Doctor Maji?"

Maji gets up from her desk and moving to the control panel mounted on the wall beside her door. "I can hack the system from here ," she says, "and I should be able to override Kohl's work long enough to give you emergency lighting, but as far as the inducer goes… I don't know. It takes a massive amount of power to maintain it, so if I can interrupt it — I'll try, at least. "

Kostya grimaces. "Do you have any idea where he would be?"

Doctor Maji shrugs helplessly. "You brought a floorplan with you," she says. "That's as much help as I'd be. I'm staying here. I suppose — I'd guess that he'd be down in the northern wing, that's where he kept his lab. But I haven't seen him for days. And I'm perfectly happy to keep it like that."

"We could go," Kostya tells Christine. "You and I. Take a few of Doctor Maji's spare lights along with us, track down Kohl's field inducer, kill it, kill _him_ if we have to, I really don't care, get the hell off of this rock. _Nyeplokha._"

Christine nods slowly. "You're good with a phaser? In case he does give us trouble?"

"Well," Kostya says, looking embarrassed, hand playing over the phaser strapped at his hip. "I might be an academic but I _am_ Russian too, you know, Nurse."

Christine turns to Blake, who's been silent since Medina — well. Since Medina. "Will you be all right to stay here with Doctor Maji?" she asks, looking her over. "How are you doing?"

"I'm fine," Blake says, "Honestly, I am."

Christine checks her pupils and her pulse, as quick a diagnosis than anything her scanner will give her. "If you aren't, it's okay, you know, I can give you a shot of — "

Blake shakes her head; some of the colour is finally coming back to her face, and when she hoists her phaser Christine can see that her narrow dark fingers are no longer trembling. "Medina was — he was — " Blake sighs, and her eyes flutter closed briefly, and she shakes her head again. "Anyway. It's not the first time I've lost a colleague, and I'm certain it won't be the last. It's the job, Nurse. Let's just get it done."

Kostya and Christine go about unhooking some of Doctor Maji's more portable lights while she goes to work on the control pad, both tucking large industrial-strength worksite lights under their arms. Christine takes a deep breath, and Maji lets out a triumphant _ah-ha_ and the lights in the hallway come back up again to half-strength. "I'll keep working at rerouting his power source from here," Maji says, "but don't hold your breath. And I don't know how long I can keep the lights up, so you'd better be ready."

"We'll be back soon," Kostya promises. "We'll get rid of it if you can't."

"We'll be here," Doctor Maji says, and Blake nods firmly.

"Right," Christine says, and they step back into the dimly-lit hallway.

They walk fast.

It's slow going, though. The place is a veritable maze of labs and sleeping quarters, and they check every room as they head northward through the complex; Christine has ample time to curse labyrinthine Starfleet architecture as they walk.

She does her best not to look up or out, into the darkness, but after an hour or so she has to ask:

"How long do the nights last here, from what you've read?"

Kostya looks upward thoughtfully. "Hmm," he says. "For this time of year? Thirty-six hours, if my calculations are correct. And they usually are, you know."

"Oh, hell," Christine says, and she hitches the light she's carrying more securely up under her arm.

"Exactly," Kostya says.

"It's weird that we haven't heard anything at from Kohl," Christine says after a pause, and remembers what McCoy said about crappy pulp horror movies. "Assuming he's still alive, anyway. I'm expecting some bad villain with a moustache. And a cat. And a tank filled with sharks. Oh, _wait_."

Kostya grins, and the lights above suddenly flare into full strength and the communicator Christine is wearing at her hip suddenly chatters with noise.

"Nurse Chapel?" Scotty says, and Christine's knees go weak with relief.

"Oh thank God," she says, scrabbling it open. Kostya sets the lights down and leans in close to hear. "Yes. Hello. Hi. We're here."

"Lovely to hear you, Nurse," Scotty says, and his voice is level and cheerful and her hands tremble just a little. "We'd lost you all for a touch there, we were starting to get quite worried up here. Could you tell us what's going on down there?"

Because she might lose her mind if she says _evil shadow piranhas from the deep_, she instead decides to elaborate on the more sane-sounding of her problems: "Someone's set up an electromagnetic field inducer," she says. "Can you beam us all out now?"

When Scotty answers his voice is grim —

"There's still too much bloody interference," he says. "We're just barely getting a signal from your communicators and your locators now, I wouldn't want to risk beaming you up here like this. It'd be — ah. Well, messy, to say the least, if my readings are right. We're going to send someone down in a shuttle to pull you out."

Christine laughs, a frantic edge to her voice. "No. Don't. Please don't send anyone else down here, for the love of God. It's just — well, can you find the source of the field inducer for us, then?" she asks, mind spinning about desperately. "We have no idea where the hell we're going, can you at least point us in the right direction?"

There's a moment of silence. Kostya pulls out the holographic floor plan of the outpost, manipulates it to find where they're standing now. "That, we can do. It's to your northeast," Scotty says, "start walking down the hall to your right," and then he cuts out and the lights overhead begin to waver and weaken.

"Fuck," Christine says, dropping the communicator as they scramble to get their portable lights set up in a ring around them before Maji loses the power for good. Kostya flicks them on, and they twist around, desperately trying to find any breaks in their circle of light.

"Christine," someone else says over the communicator, voice rough and alarmed, and her heart stops — it's McCoy. "How're you people holding up down there?"

She suddenly feels very much like crying, for the first time since this whole disaster began. "I'm fine," she says, kneeling, picking the communicator back up. "We're fine. We're alive. Most of us, anyway. Medina — Medina's dead."

The lights flicker again.

"I have to go now," Christine says, and in her rising panic here's a drawl to her vowels, a faint trace of the Cajun accent she thought she'd purged herself of long ago. She takes in a deep breath, and enunciates more clearly. "We have to keep moving. I meant it, McCoy. Make sure they don't send anyone else down here. It's not safe."

His voice is garbled. "Listen, Chapel," he says, and then there is a great deal of noisy static before one final "_goddamnit_" comes through loud and clear.

She smiles shakily. She knows, now, hearing his voice, that she'd give anything to be gone from this place, anything to just be sitting beside him again. "Goodbye," she says.

"Chapel," McCoy says again, and then the overhead lights go out with a bang and her communicator goes dead in her head.

Kostya, still standing, swears violently. The terrible noise rises around them again, chattering and buzzing in the darkness, and what happens next happens very slowly:

There is a loud clunking noise; one of their lights tumbles over and goes out, and while Christine is sitting squarely between the other lights Kostya isn't; he lets out a hoarse shout of something Russian and incomprehensible; and he is wrenched forward into the shadows.

Christine screams.

She throws herself forward and seizes Kostya around the chest just before he's yanked away into the blackness, and she pulls back with all her strength. It's not nearly enough, she braces her feet, screams again, and _pulls_, and there is a sickening crunch and she falls back against the floor but Kostya come with her —

Or most of him does, anyway. Her stomach heaves; his legs are missing from the knees down, nothing bare bloody tendons and muscle and ripped-away bone, and his stomach and chest are completely mauled apart, leaving guts and organs exposed.

"Oh, my God," she says, and he's breathing, _he's still alive_, and how is that even possible? She sends a brief prayer of thanks to whoever made Russians so goddamned _hardy_, but there isn't time to think — she rips off her satchel and empties its contents, sending vials and hypos and her tricorder clattering across the floor and she fumbles through them desperately, trying to find something to stop him, but he is lying half in her lap, bleeding to do death, his intestines spilling out onto the floor and there is _nothing she can do_.

"Nurse," Kostya says, lips gray, "Nurse, stop," and he grabs her hands and holds them tight.

"_No_," she says, wrenching away, hands flying as she tries to stop up as many bleeds as she can, "I'm not going to let you die. I won't. This is too _crazy_ for you to die like this."

"I know, _primum non nocere_, but Nurse — Christine — " Kostya clutches convulsively at her hip, hard enough to bruise. His eyes are dull; he is already slipping away. "I can promise you, trying to keep me alive like this is doing far more harm than good. Let them have me. It'll be quick."

"I'm sorry," Christine says. "I'm so, so sorry."

"I know you are," he says, and he breathes in with a wet gurgle and touches her chin, his hands slick with blood. "But it's not your fault. Just… just tell my mother for me, would you? I'd rather she hear it from you."

Christine dashes a hand across her eyes. "Of course, you know I will, I'll — " She smoothes his hair back and loads a hypospray with shaking fingers. "Let me do this much for you, at least," she says.

"Thank you," Kostya manages to choke out, "_da svedanya_," and she presses the hypo into his throat and watches as his eyes go dim and then blank and feels as his heartbeat trails off into nothing, and then she tips his body out of the light, into the darkness, and tucks her knees up against her chest and covers her ears as they — as _it_ tears him apart.

Her hands are cold and numb. She folds herself up even closer and curls her bloody fingers into her elbows and stares into the still-seething shadows, resting her wet cheek on her knee.


	4. an interlude

an interlude.

* * *

Don't move. Keep staring straight into my eyes. It feels like you're not moving, the way when, dancing, the room will suddenly fall away. You're dancing: you're neck and neck or cheek to cheek, he's there or he isn't, the open road. Imagine a room. Imagine you're dancing. Imagine the room now falling away. Don't move.  
{**you are jeff**; richard siken.}

* * *

"Christine," he says. "Christine, you have to get up now."

His hand on your arm is shaking you awake and you push it off irritably, coiling closer into yourself, knees drawn up against your chest. The floor is hard and unforgiving and you're cold and every inch of you is aching but you know that it's preferable to the alternative, it's better than facing the dark and the monsters again. "Go away," you say, and you resolutely cover your head with your arms.

He laughs, and you flinch.

"Christine," he says, and his voice amused and patronizing, like one might treat a particularly recalcitrant teenager. You push yourself up and glare at him.

"What do you _want_," you spit out. "Leave me alone."

His smile fades, and he looks at you, and you glance down at yourself. You see that you're wearing your cadet reds again, and there is a nagging suspicion you can't quite articulate in the back of your mind that this is all wrong. You look into your lap, and your hands are clean and white against all that unsettling scarlet and you stare at them for a long time; you know it's not right, you know there's something you've forgotten — there should be blood on these hands, under these fingernails —

You begin to shake.

He seizes your hands, covers them with his tanned warm large ones. "It wasn't your fault," he says, fingers encircling your wrists as hard and sure as steel; the heavy pressure is welcome and distracting, an anchor, a reminder that you are still alive. "You have to stop blaming yourself."

"I don't know," you say, and your voice quivers and breaks on a sob, "I don't know what I'm blaming myself _for_ — "

His hands slide down your forearms, languorous and strong. "Come here," he says, and his fingers curl around your elbows and draw you in close, your head cradled against his chest, his fingers drifting through your hair.

You remember everything.

Your eyes flutter closed against your memories of the blood and the shadows, and you turn your face into his neck, lower lip trembling. "No," you say like a petulant child. "No, no, no. This isn't fair."

"This is life, Christine," he says, and you remember his name now: McCoy. Leonard McCoy. But — and you know this, even as you're pretending it's not true — he is not McCoy. McCoy has never been this gentle or so infinitely sweet in his life. That's not what you love him for; and you do, you _do_ love him, if you can't say it now, when will you ever be able to?

This is not your McCoy; this is some fragment of your shattered subconscious. But the lie is comforting, for as long as it lasts. You let one hand trail up his chest, thumb smoothing over his cheekbone, fingers tracing down the stubborn line of his nose and over his lips, and you sigh and pull away.

When you open your eyes again, you are back in the outpost on Ranaulma'ar IV, curled on the floor in your circle of light amidst the blackness and the cold and the demons that claw at you, just out of reach. You are wearing your science blues, but they are more mottled red-and-brown now than blue, and Kostya's blood is caked into the creased of your fingers.

"Hey," he says, and you look back at him, surprised; you didn't expect that he would linger, but then, you're no psychologist, and you're unversed in the revelatory nature of dreams. He is crouching beside you, and he reaches out to touch the backs of his fingers to his knee. "Christine, you have to wake up. You have to finish what you've started."

"I don't want to," you say wretchedly, sitting back on your heels. "I can't do it. I don't want to do it."

"I know," he says, and his dark eyes are sad and steady as he pulls his hand away, curls it into a fist. "But you have to."

"I'm too tired," you say. "Please don't ask me to do this. I — I don't even know what I'm supposed to do."

He reaches for you, tucks a loose lock of hair behind your ear and cups your cheek in his broad hand. "You know what you have to do," he says. "Get up." Your heartbeat stammers and jumps and your face turns up to his as he leans in to kiss you, sunlight flaring behind your closed eyelids —

And then you wake up.

* * *

Thousands of miles above you on the _Enterprise_, McCoy stands over a dimly-glowing display, his fingers lingering over the screen at the last spot where the blue dot tagged with your name and number appeared, before the EM field came crashing down over the planet, before he lost you again. Kirk claps his shoulder bracingly, but McCoy doesn't look up, and he doesn't lift his hand away from the display.


	5. chapter three

chapter three.

* * *

Hold onto your voice. Hold onto your breath. Don't make a noise, don't leave the room until I come back from the dead for you. I will come back from the dead for you. This could be a city. This could be a graveyard. This could be the basket of a big balloon. Leave the lights on. Leave a trail of letters like those little knots of bread we used to dream about. We used to do a lot of things. Put your hand to the knob, your mouth to the hand, pick up the bread and devour it. I'm in the hallway again, I'm in the hallway. The radio's playing my favorite song. Leave the lights on. Keep talking. I'll keep walking toward the sound of your voice.  
{**you are jeff**; richard siken.}

* * *

Christine puts her head between her knees.

"Right," she says, and breathes deeply, lifting her head, staring into one of the lights until her eyes sting. "Okay. You can do this."

She can't, though; that's the thing. She's too afraid to move, still half-dazed with sleep, her heart still pounding from her nightmares. She's too frightened to even stand up, and even if she could gets her frozen limbs moving, well — where exactly would she be going? She can't just pick up her lights and walk down the hall and go on her merry way, the logistics of it are just impossible, she's _stuck_ unless Blake and Doctor Maji miraculously manage everything from Maji's office, and the odds of that are so slim they're practically nonexistent. She can't do anything.

Christine pushes her hair away from her face and her neck; it sticks, sweaty and bloody, to her skin. Reflectively, she thinks, _I was sure I'd be better than this._ The sims at the Academy were nothing like this; those were giggly, giddy affairs that everyone went through with their classmates, their friends. The klaxons, the smoke, the shuddering walls and flashing lights — they were just props. Window dressing. They taught you nothing of the real thing, of how to handle yourself when you're thrown to the sharks. And her time on the _Enterprise_, it's done nothing to prepare her for being so utterly alone and helpless.

She blinks the spots from her eyes and clasps her trembling hands around her knees.

Something chitters at her from the shadows, and she shudders with horror. _I'm not ready,_ she thinks, wanting to curl back into sleep and pretend it's not happening, but it's enough to push her out of immobility. Feeling sick to her stomach with fear she slowly stretches her legs out before her and braces her hands on the slick tiled floor. It takes several minutes before she's able to stand, but the thing is, she _does_ stand up, and she's more proud of herself than she'd care to articulate.

"Okay," Christine says again, and takes stock of her situation.

She is alone; she is in the dark. She has three working lights left; a scattered array of medical supplies; and her communicator, which is remaining stubbornly silent. It's been — oh, say six hours since she lost Kostya, which means that dawn is still a long way off. She also has an army of bloodthirsty goddamned _shadow piranhas_ nipping at her heels, just waiting for her to step a toe out of her circle of light.

She looks past the lights and into the dark again. She can't see anything, can't distinguish one thing from the next in the utter blackness, but that's okay; she figures she's probably better off that way.

Her hands tied, at least for now, Christine bends again and begins to gather up her abandoned hypos and vials. Most of them are crusted and smeared with dried blood, and one or two are smashed irreparably; she does her best to pick the blood off with her fingers but abandons it as a bad job after a few minutes, and when that's done and they're all tucked away in their proper spots she stands again and swings her bag back over the shoulder and looks around uncertainly, her hands playing over the thick strap.

_Northeast,_ Scotty had said, but since falling asleep she's become utterly disoriented. She entertains the notion, briefly, of picking up her lights and moving them foot-by-foot down the hall without breaking her circle of light, but she doesn't have any clue which way she should be moving anyway. She has no internal compass; she used to get lost in the _library_ as a child, for God's sake, and there are no giveaways or signposts to point her in the right direction.

"Fuck," Christine says softly, tiredly, and she's ready to give up when a staticky humming noise fills the air above the usual murmuring of the shadows and her heart leaps and she drops into a defensive crouch, hand reaching at her waist for a phaser that isn't there. _Christ,_ she thinks, and curses herself for not taking Kostya's phaser off his body, and then she wonders what good, exactly, a phaser would do her anyway.

But she doesn't have time to do more than that because the emergency lights flicker slowly to life above her. Not the full lights — which would mean that the EM field inducer was shut down, which of course would be far too much luck, more luck than the universe is willing to slide Christine's way — but enough that the shadows are dispersed and she can _do something_.

She gets back to her feet and is starting down the hall at full speed before she hears a half-weary, half-amused voice at her back.

"I think you'll find that you're headed the wrong way," a man says, and Christine stumbles to a halt and turns, wishing harder than ever that she had some kind of weapon, and speculates momentarily about the efficacy of a bootheel to the head.

The man is tall and lanky, and his Starfleet uniform is dishevelled. Ironically enough, he does have a goatee. _I'll have to tell Kostya,_ she thinks, and then her throat closes up. "Kohl," she manages to say, and he nods.

"I'm afraid so," Kohl says. "Won't you come with me?"

Christine notices the phaser in his hand, swallows, and nods, and he laughs and peers at her face in the wavering half-light.

"Sorry!" he says, and tucks the phaser into the small of his back. "Sorry. I'm not trying to threaten you, I swear. But let's not linger, yes?"

"I don't trust you," she says stoutly, but she joins him anyway and his mouth sobers behind the dark goatee.

"Fair enough," he says, and touches her arm lightly and ushers her down the hall in the opposite direction. "My lab's this way. I came as soon as I knew you were out here, Rucha just managed to get a message through to me. She's not terribly pleased with me."

"And you wonder why?" Christine asks. He's leading her effortlessly through the maze of halls and it's very odd: for all that he's caused her so much trouble, he's completely disarming. "You're doing your best to keep us in this godforsaken planet. It's bound to leave a girl resentful. I know the feeling."

His black eyes are inscrutable. "Weren't there supposed to be two of you?"

Christine tries to talk, and finds that she can't. She nods.

"I'm sorry," Kohl says gently. "This place…" He trails off and Christine realizes that he's indicating a door to her right.

"Well," she says. "Exactly. This place."

"Please," he says, and she goes in.

It's a lab, that much is clear, the counters and benches littered with scraps of machines and metal. Some kind of hastily strung-together rig dominates the back wall, wires spilling out of a soot-streaked casing, and she breathes in unsteadily. That's the field inducer, she's sure of it, and when she glances at Kohl's face it's clear that he's aware that she knows.

She perches on a stool, and he says abruptly, leaning into a steel counter, "How much do you know about this planet?"

"Not much at all," she admits. "Kostya was the only one who knew anything about it, and he's... I lost him. He's _dead_," she bites out.

"I'm going to sound awful here," Kohl says, "and I'm sure you already think I am, but — it's probably better that way. The fewer people who know anything about this place..."

Christine opens and closes her mouth. There's no way she can respond to that without _hurting_ him. "Doctor Maji said she thought there was a hive mind to them," she says finally, cautiously. "It. You think it has sentience?"

Kohl laughs, sounding slightly unhinged, and he rubs a hand over his chin as if realizing it. "Not just sentience, but ill purpose," he says, shaking his head. "It's clever. Oh, God, it's clever, as any devil from the old Earth traditions. You must have seen that," he adds, and Christine thinks: did that light really go out on its own, before it took Kostya? Starfleet tech doesn't just _fail_ like that —

"Being here, it gets in your head, as you can see," he goes on somewhat more wryly. "But you see it, don't you? No one should know about this place. And if, my God, if it escaped with one of us — "

"But don't you understand that if none of us come back, Starfleet will only send more people out here?" she says. "It won't just vanish into the ether. They won't understand, they won't just forget about it. Come back. Or let us go. Let us explain what we know, what happened here, and no one else needs to ever set foot on this place again."

His hands are knotted together, his knuckles white. "I can't," he says.

Christine touches the back of his hand. "You can," she says gently. "You can't hole up in this room forever — you don't want to die. You don't want to be responsible for more people dying."

"Don't put that on me," he says, his voice sharp. "It's not my fault. I didn't — this was only my third assignment out the Academy," he says plaintively, and Christine takes his hand.

"I know," she says. "God, do I know. But don't let all those deaths be for nothing. Don't let it start all over again."

She watches the rise and fall of his chest, wants to say more but knows it would be pushing it. At last, he raises his head and gives her a weak sort of half-smile, lips pale behind the goatee. "Fine," he says. "You're right. Fine."

"Really?" she says, startled.

Kohl gets up, crosses the room and starts to rip apart the inducer, unwiring it from the main power center. "You go," he says over his shoulder, and Christine has a brief moment to think _surely this was too easy_ before a massive bang startles her out of her seat and smoke starts billowing out from the casing.

Christine presses a hand to her lips. "Tell me," she says, fingers clenching white-knuckled on her communicator, "tell me that didn't just happen."

Kohl steps back, the tips of his fingers black, and when he looks back at her his face is horrified. "I'm sorry," he says as the lights waver and flicker. "I'm so sorry, that — that wasn't me."

"Chapel to Enterprise," she says into the communicator, doing her best to keep her voice level, hoping to God that he managed to take disable the inducer before they — it — got to the power. "Get us the hell out of here _now_."

_Not like this_, she thinks. _Not like this_.

There's a loud crashing noise outside the room. Nothing's coming out of her communicator but garbled nonsense; someone's trying to speak to her, Scotty, she thinks, hearing snatches of "can't get a lock" and a muffled "fucking _hell_" as the sound cuts in and out.

The signal clarifies and holds. "Christine," she hears, and it's McCoy, voice calm and firm. "We've beamed out Blake and Maji, but there's still too much interference in your direction. You hold on, honey. We're getting you — "

The communicator cuts out again, and she nearly screams in frustration.

Kohl goes to the door. "Hallway's lost lights," he says, and steps hurriedly away into the center of the room. Christine wraps her arms around her stomach and stands as still as she can, like that might help or something, oh _God_. She turns her face upwards to the transparisteel ceiling, staring up at the black sky; there's no way to see the _Enterprise_ from down here, but she thinks, _I don't want to die,_ and _not without seeing him again,_ and she reaches out and seizes Kohl's forearm. He stares at her, pulling away automatically.

"Shut up," she says, "and let me save your life."

The words aren't out of her mouth before she can feel the weird energy of the transporter start to tingle through her bones, and her knees go weak with relief, but the lights give out with a violent bang and darkness swallows her up and Kohl is shouting beside her and she screams because _the shadow is upon her_ —


	6. chapter four

chapter four.

* * *

What would you like? I'd like my money's worth.  
Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this—  
swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood  
on the first four knuckles.  
We pull our boots on with both hands  
but we can't punch ourselves awake and all I can do  
is stand on the curb and say _Sorry  
about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine._  
{**little beast**; richard siken.}

* * *

— She stumbles forward, and the world is white and blinding and her skin feels like it's been ripped apart by a thousand tiny burning knives and her ears are ringing too loudly to hear anything and she hurts, oh God, every _inch_ of her hurts, she's so lightheaded with it her stomach flips and she knows she's about to either black out or quickly lose the Fergalian pear she ate this morning.

Her legs collapse, and she trips off the transporter pad into McCoy's waiting arms.

It takes a long time for her to realize that he's speaking. She pulls herself out of the haze of agony with effort; "It's okay, Christine," he says as though from a great distance, or from underwater, "we've got you," and then he's snapping orders to the medical staff, holding her when she slumps against him, insensible with pain, even though every inch of her aches where he touches her.

She knows her lips are moving, she knows she's talking even though she can't quite hear herself. "Kohl," she gasps out, "did you get him," and McCoy is nodding at her, dropping his shoulder so she can see past him. Kohl is already in a stretcher, but his skin is gray, at least where she can see it under the vicious splashes of blood.

Dimly, out of the corner of her eye, she can see a nurse approach, the hypospray in her hands loaded with a heavy sedative. _No_, she wants to say, _don't let me sleep, it could be here, you don't understand_, but she can't quite make her muscles work anymore and McCoy is lifting her and she wants to fight against him but she _can't_ and a scream is trapped in her throat before the darkness overtakes her again.

When she awakens next, it is to his face, almost obscured behind the glare of a lit monitor screen. She throws a hand up to protect her eyes, and instantly regrets it; she still hurts all over, though less, infinitely less than before.

"Hello, Sleeping Beauty," McCoy says, and he smiles as she drops her hand, moving out of the light so she can see his face properly. "How're you feeling?"

"Better," she says, and adds, "but pretty terrible, all things considered. How am I doing?"

She goes to sweep her bangs off her forehead, but finds that her hair is snarled and matted; she can't get her fingers through it.

"We've repaired most of the damage to your skin from — whatever the hell that was. You'll be pretty sore for the next few days, and we'll need to do a second round with the dermal regenerator in a bit — " He salutes her with it before leaving it on top of a console. "But right now I just want you to rest, all right?"

Christine ignores him and sits up slowly, laboriously; he steps forward quickly to take her elbow but she waves him off, grimacing. "Augh," she says, and she swings her feet off the bed and clutches at the edge of the thin mattress against the pain.

She's still wearing her boots, still in her uniform, but it's in tatters from — from _it_, and from the efforts of the doctors, and it's stiff, too with several layers of blood at this point. She fingers the ragged edge of her skirt hesitantly. She can see the teeth marks.

McCoy's face sobers, and he leans over her, running a scanner over the crown of her head. "That was a bit of narrow escape you made back there, even by this ship's standards," he says as the scanner beeps, and she shakes her head, drawing her knees up a bit, resting her feet on the bedframe —

"You don't know the half of it."

His free hand works uselessly, opening and closing. "I'm sorry," he says, and she looks up at him; one eyebrow is raised against the force of his emotions, and his whole face is tight and closed-off. "I'm so sorry. That should've been me down there, goddamnit, you should never have had to — "

"Don't," she says shortly, looking away.

He doesn't understand, not at all, and she is too weary to explain it. "What do you mean?" he says, and across sickbay, she can see Kohl in one of the biobeds, his uniform still stained with bright blossoms of scarlet just as hers is. Doctor Maji is standing over him, her lips tight and furious as he talks earnestly, hands spreading wide.

Kohl's face is pale and drawn, but his skin has mostly healed, and when he's done speaking Christine sees Maji reach for him, her face softening as she touches one finger hesitantly down his jaw.

Christine turns away quickly, flushing.

"Don't call me honey," she says suddenly, sitting up a little straighter, dropping her feet to the floor.

He stares, clearly thrown. "I beg your pardon?" he says.

She gestures. "Before. On the communicator." She shrugs, and feels a heavy weight settle in her stomach: she's being needlessly cruel. He's not the one she wants to hurt, but she can't seem to stop herself. "Just… don't call me honey. Or sweetheart. Or darling. Not in front of the crew, and — and not if you don't mean it. Don't say things just for the sake of _saying_ them."

McCoy blinks. "I'm sorry. I didn't — " He pauses and clears his throat, his brow furrowed now, and he repeats, "I didn't mean to offend you."

"You're CMO," Christine says, voice cutting. "You're a professional, McCoy. Act like it."

She looks down at her hands, wanting to choke herself with them.

"I'll go now," he says, and he backs out the door. She stares ahead sightlessly. "Just give them a shout out here if you need anything, all right?"

Christine doesn't answer. She waits until McCoy's disappeared into his office, then just curls back into the biobed and closes her eyes. She doesn't sleep — she _can't_ sleep — but she pretends that she is anyway so they'll leave her alone.

The hours pass; the ship slides silently into gamma shift around her, and sickbay quiets down enough that she can slip away unnoticed from the watchful care of her staff. She's Head Nurse; she has an unauthorized security override or two stored away.

She's nearly made it to her rooms when his voice stops her.

"Nurse Chapel," McCoy says.

She leans against the wall resignedly without turning. It almost doesn't hurt. "I'm sorry," she says, "but I'm afraid I'm busy tonight. I need to wash my hair. Can we wait on the psych consult till tomorrow?"

He walks toward her, but stops short just behind her. She turns, and the look on his face is indecipherable. "Where are you going?"

Christine considers several options and settles on the truth. It's easiest. "I have a few calls to make," she says.

His lips part; he knows what she means. "Well," he says. "Not in that condition, you aren't," and she looks down at herself.

"Oh," she says, and she pushes herself off the wall and continues a few more slow steps down the corridor. Her fingers work the keypad of her door automatically, which is good — she doesn't know that she would remember her passcode if she stopped to think about it.

"You should come back to sickbay," he says, and she looks over her shoulder at him with some surprise.

"Are you still here?" she says, and the door of her room slides open. It is pitch-dark, and she swallows hard, and thinks, _here is the moment of truth_ —

Christine steps forward across the threshold, and nothing happens.

"Ah," she says to herself. It is anticlimactic, almost disappointingly so. "Lights."

McCoy comes with her, and the door slides back closed with a slight hiss. "Are you all right?" he says.

"No," she says.

She starts to strip herself down to her underwear slowly, not caring that he's still here, too blankly tired to worry about being embarrassed, but her blood-stiff uniform sticks to her skin. When it's in an awkward heap on the floor about her feet she looks down at herself, at the deepest, most tender spots the dermal regenerator didn't get in the first session. The pain has settled down to a quiet muted throb, but she's filthy and bloody and bruised from Kostya Levin's desperately grasping hands, vibrant purple and blue dappled across her hip and stomach, and she presses the back of her fist to her mouth to stop herself from retching and sits down hard on her bed.

He's at her side before she even has time to remember that he's here. "Chapel," he says, voice hesitant, clearly loath to touch her, and her face crumples: why is she doing her best to push him away with both hands when all she wants to do is hold on to him and never let go?

"I thought," she says, "I'd never see you again," and her voice doesn't quaver but he reaches for her freezing hands and she grabs him then, and kisses him blindly, violently, her nails raking through his hair as she leans into him hard, knocking him off balance. It is both inevitable and frighteningly strange; it wasn't supposed to happen like this, but then, nothing ever is. He makes a noise of surprise, bracing himself on the bed, but his mouth opens easily to the onslaught of her teeth and her tongue and she is half in his lap, her knee thrown over his thigh, hand dragging down his chest and down his stomach and further still —

He pulls away, his lips raw and bitten red, and she realizes her hands are shaking and she clasps them together, trying to stop herself from flying apart altogether. She feels colder than ever, her breathing as harsh and uneven as his, and she's startlingly aware of how little she's wearing. She untangles her legs from his, lowering her feet back to the floor. For a moment she's horrified at herself, and she can't look up at him: he must think she's crazy.

But she doesn't regret it, not really.

"Christ, I'm sorry," she says to her lap finally, "I'm so sorry," and he leans in close and bumps his shoulder into hers, shaking his head, his hazel eyes dark and unreadable in the stark lighting of her room.

"You don't have anything to be sorry about," he says, and his fist closes over her trembling hands. "I'm surprised you're holding up as well as you are, to be honest. You're exhausted. You're in shock. You don't know what you're — "

Her temper flares at that, and she pulls her hands away from his, presses her fingers to his lips to cut him off. "I know what I'm doing," she says, giddy with this strange new surety born of adrenaline and sheer terror. "Shut up." She lifts her fingers and kisses him again, lightly this time, sweetly, and he catches her hands and turns them over; they are still lined and stained with blood. She can't tell anymore what blood's hers, and what's not.

"Do you want me to stay?" he asks, still looking at her hands, and she nods wordlessly.

"Yes," she says. McCoy meets her gaze and holds it. "Stay."

He stands and disappears into her bathroom unit, and when he comes back he has a damp washcloth with him. "You look like hell, Chapel," he says, lips twisted ironically, and she turns her palms flat up to him as he kneels before her. He swipes at her hands slowly, methodically, working over each finger until her skin is pink and clean, and then he moves his hand to her lips, scrubbing the cloth over her chin, dragging at the crease that runs from her nose to her mouth. The washcloth comes away brown and maroon, and she shuts her eyes so she doesn't have to see it.

"Christine," he says softly, and then he unzips her boots and drags them off her feet, and she digs her bare toes flat into the floor, shivering again. He climbs to his feet to sit on the bed beside her, and his body is hot against hers, and she feels something in her core melting and falling away.

"It's the not knowing," she says suddenly. "Not knowing what it was, not knowing what I could've done differently, not knowing what will happen next — and we'll never know, will we? Kohl will see to it, despite Maji. I know it."

He doesn't say anything.

"They're dead," she says, "and it's my fault. I should've — I could've saved them. Why didn't I — "

She stops, strangled into silence, and McCoy brushes her hair back from her face, speaking into her shoulder. "You did everything you could," he says, hand trailing lightly down the length of her spine.

"You don't know that," she says. "You don't know what it was like. You can't know."

He presses his lips into the sloping curve where her shoulder meets her throat. "But I know you," he says, his hand curling warm against her ribs. "I know you, Christine."

She leans back into him, every muscle in her body wound so tight her bones begin to ache.

"Please don't leave," Christine says.

"I'm not going anywhere," McCoy says, and her stomach unclenches just that much, the tendons in the backs of her hands relaxing. "I promise you that much."

She turns her face up to his and he kisses her this time, lingering and deep, and he leans his forehead against hers.

She doesn't sleep that night, and neither does he.


	7. an epilogue

an epilogue.

* * *

The way you slam your body into mine reminds me  
I'm alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling,  
and they're only a few steps behind you, finding  
the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren't  
stitched up quite right, the place they could almost  
slip right into through if the skin wasn't trying to  
keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side  
of the theater where the curtain keeps rising.  
{**snow and dirty rain**; richard siken.}

* * *

Some nights, you still have to keep the lights on.

Tonight is not a bad one; there is a fat yellow moon in the sky dimly tracing out the trees and the field outside the open window, and the few panels of moonlight thrown across the bed highlight crumpled white sheets and the slices of silver in his tousled hair. A padd has been left glowing dully on the nightstand, and you walk to it barefooted, stepping lightly around the creaks in the floorboards. You are not an insomniac — not yet, anyway, not quite — but most nights find you restless and awake, and whatever he was reading might offer some diversion. The screen has several medical journals called up; you scroll through them distractedly and then power the padd down with one finger.

There's a brisk snap to the air, the sharp smell of fall rising on the breeze. The year has turned.

You climb onto the bed and kneel beside him, the mattress sagging ominously beneath you. You know he has to be up early tomorrow but you idly card your fingers through his hair anyway with a proprietary sort of affection.

"Hey," you whisper in his ear.

He grunts. "What," he says, not opening his eyes.

"Push over and give me some blankets, you jerk," you say, and he turns over obediently but takes the quilt with him. You prod his broad back, between the shoulder blades, and when he doesn't respond you climb in next to him and tuck your feet in between his legs. He makes a muffled noise of protest.

"Not nice," he says around a yawn, into his pillow, and then he suddenly rolls and traps you in the warm circle of his arms, one leg thrown over your waist to better pinion you. "Christ, your feet are like ice, woman."

"Ouf," you say, and you burrow back against his chest. "Better," you add.

You watch the play of starlight through the fluttering leaves on the old oak outside the window, feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest at your back, and it's almost enough to lull you into slumber but he knows you too well and he says sleepily, "What is it, then," his breath hot against your ear.

"I just got a message from Starfleet," you say, hauling a pillow closer, tucking your cold hands under it. "They want me in San Francisco next week to discuss my next appointment."

"_Christine_," he says delightedly, and you can hear the smile in his voice; you twist so you can see his face properly. He looks remarkably more awake now.

"Impressed, Doctor McCoy?"

"Very, Doctor Chapel," he says, looking at you from under the dark crescent of his eyelashes, and he leans in to kiss you but you pull away and flop onto your back with a sigh, squinting at your nails lazily.

"Oh," you say, "That's _Director of Starfleet Emergency Operations_ Chapel, thanks," and you are studiously not looking at him while you pick at your cuticles but out of the corner of your eye, you can see his eyes widen.

"You're kidding me," he says, propping himself up on his elbow, and you take the opportunity to tug the quilt away from him completely.

"Your faith in my capabilities is astounding," you say drily, burying your toes in the blanket, pulling it up to your chin and luxuriating in the warmth, but he quickly strips it away and straddles you, capturing your wrists and sliding your hands through the sheets until your knuckles rap against the headboard.

"Christine," he says again, eyes bright.

"Cold," you complain, fingers curling around his, but your heart is fluttering in your breast and when he lowers himself to kiss you it lights a warm fire in your belly, a glow in your cheeks.

"Have I told you lately how goddamned brilliant you are?" he says, one hand slipping down your stomach and around your back, his other palm still pressed tight to yours. You arch up against him, fitting your hips flush to his, and his next words catch on his lips.

"Oh, I don't know," you say, pleased to see you can still render him speechless after all this time, and he drops a kiss behind your ear, into your hair as you raise your clasped hands to your mouth, biting the pad of his thumb lightly before you kiss it and let it go. "I think I can stand to hear it again."

"Yeah?" he murmurs, fingers drifting, tracing arcane designs over your skin, his mouth like a burning brand making its way down your cool flesh and your eyes drift closed and your blood is pounding and your pulse is racing and with a sudden heady rush of vertigo for a moment the blackness behind your eyelids is choking, terrifying, drowning. You freeze, and his hands on you still; he draws back and says your name once more with an edge of worry in his voice, and with your heartbeat drumming in your ears you almost don't hear it.

You open your eyes to his face and the moonlight, and as you try to catch your breath your throat aches because you could never, never tell him how much you love him, how much this means to you.

"Yes," you say simply, hooking one leg behind his knee to pull him closer, and he proceeds to tell you exactly how brilliant he thinks you are in a manner far more eloquent than mere words.

Much later, as you sit bleary-eyed at the battered kitchen table over a cooling cup of coffee, he looks up from his patient files and favors you with a dark, unfathomable look. Sunlight abruptly breaks through the warped window over the sink, and you have to squint at him against the light.

"What?" you say defensively, putting a hand to your tangled hair.

His smile is rueful, and shakes his head almost self-mockingly. "God, I'll miss you," he says, and you abandon your coffee, get up from your chair, take the slim sheet of radiant plastic from his hands and leave it beside his plate as you drop a kiss on his cheek.

"Well, I'm not going anywhere for awhile yet, you know," you say, and then you are tongue-tied as you reach for his empty glass, and he tugs at your waist and pulls you into his lap. The chair groans under your added weight, and you slip an am around his neck and look at him levelly as your feet dangle off the floor.

His smile is steadier this time but his eyes are sombre, and he draws a hand through your hair and then twines his fingers through yours, thumb curling into your palm. You shift in his lap and tuck your head against his chest and breathe in shakily and you know that for now anyway this, this is enough.

The monsters can wait.

* * *

{end.}


End file.
